The Choice

The Clinton-Obama battle reveals two very different ideas of the Presidency.

To Clinton, the Presidency is more about achieving goals than about transforming society.Credit Illustration by Mark Ulriksen

In the fall of 1971, a Yale Law School student named Greg Craig sublet his apartment, on Edgewood Avenue, in New Haven, to his classmate Hillary Rodham and her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, for seventy-five dollars a month. Over the following decades, Craig and the Clintons continued to cross paths. Craig, who became a partner at the blue-chip law firm Williams & Connolly, in Washington, D.C., received regular invitations to White House Christmas parties, where Hillary always remembered to ask about his five children. In the fall of 1998, President Clinton asked him to lead the defense team that the White House was assembling for the impeachment battle. On a bookshelf in Craig’s large corner office are several photographs of him with one or both Clintons, including a snapshot of the President and his lawyers—their arms folded victoriously across their chests—taken after Craig’s successful presentation during the Senate trial. An inscription reads, “To Greg. We struck the right pose—and you struck the right chords! Thanks—Bill Clinton, 2/99.”

In spite of his long history with the Clintons, Craig is an adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign. “Ninety-five per cent of it is because of my enthusiasm for Obama,” he said last month, at his law office. “I really regard him as a fresh and exciting voice in American politics that has not been in my life since Robert Kennedy.” In 1968, Craig, who is sixty-two, was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy when he heard a Bobby Kennedy speech at the University of Nebraska, and became a believer on the spot. Since then, Craig has not been inspired by any American President. As for the prospect of another Clinton Presidency, he said, “I don’t discount the possibility of her being able to inspire me. But she hasn’t in the past, and Obama has.”

Inspiration is an underexamined part of political life and Presidential leadership. In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. On rare occasions, however, a leader can become the object of an intensely personal, almost spiritual desire for cleansing, community, renewal—for what Hillary, in a 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley, called “more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” Somewhere between the merely great communicators and the secular saints are the exceptional politicians who, as Hillary put it then, “practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”

Robert B. Reich, the Secretary of Labor in Clinton’s first term, who now teaches at Berkeley, told me that he believes political inspiration to be “the legitimizing of social movements and social change, the empowering of all sorts of people and groups to act as remarkable change agents.” Reich was once a close friend of both Clintons—he met Hillary when they were undergraduates, and began a Rhodes Scholarship the same year as Bill—but he has not endorsed a candidate, and he seems drawn to Obama, for the same reasons that attracted Craig. “Obama is to me very analogous to Robert Kennedy,” Reich said. “The closer you got to him, the more you realized that his magic lay in his effect on others rather than in any specific policies. But he became a very important vehicle. He got young people very excited. He was transformative in the sense of just who he was. And a few things he said about social justice licensed people. Obama does all that, almost effortlessly.”

The alternatives facing Democratic voters have been characterized variously as a choice between experience and change, between an insider and an outsider, and between two firsts—a woman and a black man. But perhaps the most important difference between these two politicians—whose policy views, after all, are almost indistinguishable—lies in their rival conceptions of the Presidency. Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore faith in government. Clinton presents politics as the art of the possible, with change coming incrementally through good governance, a skill that she has honed in her career as advocate, First Lady, and senator. This is the real meaning of the remark she made during one of the New Hampshire debates: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do—the President before had not even tried—but it took a President to get it done.”

In the overheated atmosphere of a closely fought primary, this historically sound statement set off a chain reaction of accusations, declarations of offense, and media hysteria, and for a few days the Democratic Party seemed poised to descend into a self-destructive frenzy of identity politics. The Times editorial page scolded Clinton for playing racial politics and choosing a bizarre role model in Johnson; the columnist Bob Herbert accused her of taking “cheap shots” at King. But Clinton was simply expressing her belief that the Presidency is more about pushing difficult legislation through a fractious Congress than it is about transforming society. In the recent debate before the Nevada caucus, Obama, who confessed to being disorganized, said that the Presidency has little to do with running an efficient office: “It involves having a vision for where the country needs to go . . . and then being able to mobilize and inspire the American people to get behind that agenda for change.” In reply, Clinton likened the job of President to that of a “chief executive officer” who has “to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy.”

Similarly, if this campaign is, among other things, a referendum on the current occupant of the White House—as elections at the end of failed Presidencies inevitably are—then its outcome will be determined partly by whether voters find George W. Bush guilty of incompetence or of demeaning American politics. Clinton is presenting herself as the candidate who is tough and knowledgeable enough to fix the broken systems of government: the intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, the legislative process, the White House itself. Last week, speaking on the phone from California, she said that a President allows advisers to oversee the running of government at his or her peril. “Otherwise, you cede too much authority, and although it may not be immediately apparent to the public, the government picks up on those signals,” she said. “What we now know about how Dick Cheney basically controlled the information going to Bush means that we’ll never really know how much responsibility Bush should be assumed to have taken with respect to serious decisions. The water will flow downstream, and often pool in great reservoirs of power that will then be taken advantage of by those who have been smart enough to figure out how to pull the levers. And I know from my own experience, and certainly watching how deeply involved Bill was in those areas that he thought were important, what it takes to try to get the government to respond. It’s not easy. We’re talking about this massive bureaucracy . . . and you have to be prepared on Day One to basically wrest the power away in order to realize the goals and vision that you have for the country.”

Although Clinton didn’t utter her chief rival’s name, Obama seemed to be the subtext of many of her remarks, such as when she mentioned reading Michael Korda’s recent biography of Eisenhower, and compared the portraits of Ike and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery—“who was given great marks for being so brilliant and inspiring of his men, but often had a difficult time making a tough decision, often dithered about it, and claimed he needed yet more information before he could pull the trigger.” If elected President, Clinton acknowledged, she would have to use unifying rhetoric and reach across partisan lines. But Clinton is less sanguine than Obama is about the possibilities of such efforts; she is readier to march ahead and let those who will follow do so. “It’s also important to say, ‘Look, there are certain things we have to do as a country. You may not agree, but let me explain why, and let me try to persuade you. But if I can’t persuade you, we have to go forward anyway.’ And I think that that kind of understanding of the combination of using the bully pulpit but also producing results—managing the government so it doesn’t manage you, so it does act as an instrument of the policies you’re actually implementing—will give proof to what it is I’m saying.”

These rival conceptions of the Presidency—Clinton as executive, Obama as visionary—reflect a deeper difference in how the two candidates analyze what ails the country. Obama’s diagnosis is more fundamental: for him, the illness precedes the Bush years and the partisan deadlock in Washington, originating in a basic failure of politicians to bring Americans together. A strong hand on the wheel won’t make a difference if your car is stuck in the mud; a good leader has to persuade enough people to get out and push. Whereas Clinton echoes Churchill, who proclaimed, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” Obama invokes Lincoln, who said, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Sidney Blumenthal, a former staff writer at this magazine, who was a senior adviser to Bill Clinton and is now a senior adviser on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, describes the 2008 election as a chance to secure progressive government for years to come. “It’s not a question of transcending partisanship,” he said. “It’s a question of fulfilling it. If we can win and govern well while handling multiple crises at the same time and the Congress, then we can move the country out of this Republican era and into a progressive Democratic era, for a long period of time.”

Peter Wehner served in the Bush White House until August, 2007, working for Karl Rove, the Administration’s chief strategist. Wehner, who is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Washington, said that, as a candidate, Hillary Clinton would provide a “much more target-rich environment” than Obama. Republicans wouldn’t need to uncover new scandals; they would simply remind voters of the not so distant Clinton wars. “Certain regions of your brain are latent,” Wehner said. “But if there’s a word or a sound or a memory that you hear, that region of your brain lights up again. And I have a feeling that, with Bill and Hillary Clinton, there are latent regions of the brain that will light up, and, if the Democrats don’t light it up, the Republicans will. And that is going to be Clinton fatigue.” As for Obama, Wehner’s only complaint is that he’s a liberal: “I find him to be very impressive. He would be much more difficult for Republicans to handle. He has much more breakout potential.”

Advisers to Clinton told me that there is something naïve, even potentially fatal, in Obama’s vision of leading the country out of its current political battles. The advisers seemed to be saying that Obama considers civility and nonpartisanship to be amulets that can stop bullets. In this view, Obama will be annihilated by what members of the Clinton campaign call “the Republican attack machine.” Neera Tanden, the campaign’s policy director, expressed admiration for Obama but cautioned that the general election will be brutal. “You cannot let your guard down with these guys,” she said of right-wing politicians. “They take people’s strengths and make them weaknesses; if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. They’re not ready to give up. They’re not ready to lose the Congress and the Presidency. I don’t think Grover Norquist”—the conservative lobbyist—“is sitting around thinking that’s going to be great for him. His salary depends on it, at the very least. Both of the Clintons have been through it and won before. But if we don’t think that the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, is going to have high negatives by the end of this process, then we’re crazy.”

Late last year, as the Democratic race was tightening, there was an argument within the Clinton camp over whether to go on the attack against Obama—an argument won by the proponents. When I described to Greg Craig the Clinton campaign’s skepticism toward the idea of transcending partisanship, he said, “You’re getting to that five per cent of Hillary that I don’t like—which is to see in every corner a conspiracy or an opponent that must be crushed. Look at her comment ‘Now the fun part starts’ ”—Clinton’s announcement in Iowa that she would begin attacking Obama’s record. “There is a quality of playing the embattled, beleaguered victim that I find unappealing and depressing.” He added, “I want a President who is looking to move the country with positive inspirational ideas rather than to fight off the bad guys and proclaim victory by defeating the forces of reaction. I would like us to inspire the forces of reaction to join us in treating people better, and lifting more vulnerable people and people in jeopardy out of their vulnerability and jeopardy.”

Of course, as Craig learned during the impeachment effort—which he denounced as “a gross abuse of power”—the Republicans in Congress have shown little interest in making peace with Democrats. “Yes, but the way in which you beat them, the way in which you make progress in this country, is not by further polarizing and further dividing,” Craig said. “It’s by building the consensus around the positions that make sense—say, the position that we should not have forty-seven million Americans uninsured. You don’t win national health insurance by turning Republicans against you. You’ve got to get them to join you.”

Clinton’s admirers counter that, as a member of the U.S. Senate, she has learned the art of compromise. In just seven years, she has mastered the power relationships and legislative labyrinths of this most difficult club. “Hillary believes in governing,” Neera Tanden said. When Tanden worked as her legislative director, Clinton would call again and again from the Senate floor to gauge the effect that a new amendment would have on a bill. Such attention to minutiae is rare in a legislator. The question, though, is whether her indisputable virtues—hard work, intellectual acuity, a command of policy—are ideally suited for the White House. A senator must convince fifty to sixty fellow-politicians; a President must rouse three hundred million fellow-citizens.

In the nineteen-nineties, Republicans, taking aim at an all-too-human Democratic President, liked to say “character matters”—a phrase that has been bitterly reprised by Democrats during the Bush years. If there’s a flaw in Hillary Clinton’s character which could keep her from becoming a successful President, or President at all, it is what Carl Bernstein, her best biographer, described to me as a tendency toward “subterfuge and eliding.” In the deep and sympathetic portrait “A Woman in Charge,” Bernstein’s recent biography of Clinton, a constant theme is her fear of humiliation; as the daughter of a harsh, often cruel father, she learned early to conceal any weakness and, ultimately, to protect her very humanity from exposure. In the recent Las Vegas debate, when Clinton was asked to name a weakness, all she could come up with was her impatience to get things done.

“In her personal life, she’s always seemed like she had something to hide,” Dee Dee Myers, who was a top adviser on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and who served as White House press secretary for the first two years of his Presidency, said. “She had a difficult father, and she spent a lot of time trying to create an image of a functional family when she could have just said, ‘It’s my family.’ The burden of perfection was upon her, and she carried it into her marriage. There’s always this fear of letting people see what they already know.”

In “A Woman in Charge,” Bernstein writes of Clinton, “Almost always, something holds her back from telling the whole story, as if she doesn’t trust the reader, listener, friend, interviewer, constituent—or perhaps herself—to understand the true significance of events.” A former Clinton Administration official explained his decision to support Obama by urging me to read the two candidates’ autobiographies side by side. Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” unlike Clinton’s “Living History,” he said, reveals a narrator who has struggled through difficult questions of identity and resolved them, and who, as a result, is comfortable not just with himself but with the complexity and contradiction of the world. “When I’m with her, I feel she wants to impress me,” the former official said. “When I’m with him, I feel he wants to know what I have to offer him.”

In numerous conversations, friends of both Clintons expressed a preference for Hillary, upending the public perception that Bill is the warmer and more likable of the two. He talks; she listens, with a talent for banter that can be disarming and even whimsical. Shortly after Lissa Muscatine, a close adviser of Hillary Clinton’s, went to work as a White House speechwriter, in 1993, she tried to catch the First Lady’s attention as Clinton was hurrying along a corridor. “Stop—stop!” Muscatine called out. Clinton wheeled around. “Stop! in the name of love,” she sang out, breaking into a boogie in the West Wing hallway. Clinton’s aides are famously loyal, staying with her far longer than most staffs at the highest level of politics. Tanden, who was in her twenties when she joined Clinton’s staff, in 1997, and “sort of grew up working for her,” found that Clinton really wanted to know what a mid-level aide thought about policy issues. “She asks questions, and she has a very high b.s. detector on people,” Tanden said. “You get in her foxhole, she gets in your foxhole.” In 1999, when Muscatine underwent surgery in order to determine if she had breast cancer, the First Lady asked her to telephone as soon as she had a diagnosis. The tumor was malignant, and Muscatine was too overwhelmed by the news to call, as they had agreed. Clinton phoned her and said, “If it’s O.K., I want to check back every few days. But, if you don’t want to come to the phone, that’s fine.” Muscatine told me, “She gave me not only her support but the license not to talk to someone of her stature. That meant the world to me.” Richard Holbrooke, who served as Clinton’s envoy on Bosnia and as Ambassador to the United Nations, is now a foreign-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. (He is sometimes spoken of as a potential Secretary of State.) He said of Clinton, “I like her because she’s human. She has a vulnerable side. She’s fighting for things she really believes in.”

Several friends also describe Clinton as more committed to using power for social change than her husband—for example, during the health-care reform effort of 1993-94, she insisted on universal coverage even after President Clinton became willing to drop it. (Her intransigence, of course, helped doom the entire effort.) John Danner, who worked for Clinton during his first term as governor of Arkansas, said, “Bill’s policy wonkishness, in my judgment at least, was an application of his insatiable curiosity. People confuse that with a deep caring about actually getting anything done with the political power that he’d got. Hillary has always had a tenacity and a toughness that Bill never had. In that sense, she has cared more about getting stuff done.” Danner’s wife, Nancy Pietrafesa, who attended Wellesley with Hillary, also worked for Bill Clinton in Arkansas. (The two couples had a falling out after Danner and Pietrafesa were fired.) Pietrafesa said that Hillary’s fear of public exposure was connected to those early years in Arkansas. “To be so humiliated, and ruthlessly,” Pietrafesa said. “In Arkansas, she went to a place she wasn’t welcomed, big time. Everything was wrong with her. She didn’t paint her toenails when she wore sandals, she didn’t look like a cocktail waitress when she dressed up. Everybody really felt they could insult her with impunity.”

Clinton’s instinct to fight back was honed in the rough world of Arkansas politics. Once, when the two couples were talking about policy matters, Danner proposed a way to offer retail discounts to Arkansas’s substantial elderly population. To the astonishment of Danner and Pietrafesa, Hillary responded, “The last thing we need to do right now is something for folks who didn’t vote for Bill.” She had, Danner remembered, “this binary view of the world, a little like Bush’s comment ‘You’re with us or you’re against us.’ ” In Pietrafesa’s opinion, “Hillary needs enemies.”

During the tumultuous early years of her husband’s Presidency, Clinton’s ambitious political goals were too often stymied by her penchant for secrecy and combativeness. In one controversy after another—Whitewater, the travel-office scandal, the Paula Jones lawsuit—she refused to compromise or be forthcoming, and allowed what might have been temporary embarrassments to become part of an endless battle that helped derail the progressive reforms on which the Clintons had campaigned, including health-care legislation.

In early 1995, not long after the Republicans’ sweeping win in the midterm elections, Hillary Clinton met with a dozen advisers in the White House residence to discuss how to handle the new political reality, which would include congressional investigations on Whitewater and other matters. One argument—the one that she had always made—was to “batten down the hatches, fight to the death,” in the words of an adviser who attended the meeting; another was to defuse the opposition as much as possible through openness. At one point, almost as if she were thinking aloud, Clinton suddenly said, “I need people like the people J.F.K. had around him.” The adviser described the moment as “existential” for Clinton: she was saying that she wanted “people who were strong, tough, loyal, who play to win but do it in the smart, strategic way.” Clinton’s way had not been smart or strategic. Afterward, she grudgingly began to change her approach, withdrawing from the front lines of political battles and, as some of her aides had urged, using her platform more symbolically rather than always trying to achieve concrete results.

That year, Clinton began writing a book about children and society called “It Takes a Village.” The thing that Washington insiders remember best about the book is Hillary’s failure to thank Barbara Feinman, the writer hired by Simon & Schuster, the publisher, as a collaborator. The truth, though, is more complicated, and shows Hillary to be less a Machiavellian liar than a woman whose guardedness leads to self-sabotage.

Editors at Simon & Schuster reacted to early chapters with dismay, and worried about the quality of Feinman’s contributions, but they kept their reactions private. Over the summer, a manuscript emerged, but neither the publisher nor Clinton’s aides—nor, especially, Hillary herself—were pleased with it. When Feinman left for vacation, Clinton, a Simon & Schuster editor, and a few key aides, working on their own time, continued on the book without her. (Feinman fulfilled the terms of her contract, and was never told by the publisher that her work was unsatisfactory.) In November, the Simon & Schuster editor spent three weeks at the White House, working intensively to expand and refine the material with the aides and with Clinton, who filled yellow legal pads with incorrigibly wonky prose, in “round, schoolgirlish handwriting,” the editor told me. In private, Clinton was strikingly relaxed, padding around the Book Room and Solarium in sweatpants and Coke-bottle glasses, the editor said, calling her “buttercup.” Clinton’s personality, the editor found, “is refreshingly sharp and clear—but she can’t show it.”

“It Takes a Village” appeared in January, 1996, with an acknowledgments page that mentioned nobody. Clinton had apparently given in to the urge to pay her ghostwriter back (as had Simon & Schuster, which considered withholding the last portion of Feinman’s hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar fee but quickly relented). Clinton’s omission aroused the enmity of powerful friends of Feinman’s at the Washington Post, and journalists began covering the slight, their suspicions roused by Clinton’s explanation that she had forgone names in the acknowledgments for fear of leaving someone out. Hillary’s triumphant return to the public eye became another embarrassment. As with so many other Clinton scandals, the press framed the story in the worst possible light, and got its essence wrong, suggesting that Feinman had written the whole book and that Clinton had stolen the credit. Instead, Clinton had micromanaged every aspect of the book’s development. The episode captures her habit of undermining herself, when the worst might have been averted by a little candor and grace—a tendency that has reappeared in the past few weeks, as her campaign has responded to the shock of Obama’s challenge.

In the Senate, Clinton seems to have taken the hard lessons of the White House years to heart, and become a far better politician. The majority of her legislative achievements, for the most part under Republican control of Congress, have been modest, and geared toward constituent service. Richard Holbrooke pointed out that Fort Drum, outside Watertown, New York, stayed open and was even expanded during a period of base closures, and said, “To her, it’s one of her most important achievements. She’s incredibly proud of it.” A senior Democrat on the Senate staff, who declined to be named, pointed out that Clinton’s focus on New York was necessary to win over her colleagues: “She demonstrated that she was a workhorse, not a show horse.” Clinton has surprised Republicans by coöperating with erstwhile enemies of her husband’s Administration, such as Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, who was a House impeachment manager in 1998, and Trent Lott, of Mississippi, who in 2000 expressed a hope that lightning might strike Clinton before her first day in the Senate. And she has surprised the military by becoming an expert on defense policy, as New York’s first member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A member of Clinton’s campaign told me that Obama has not held a single hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee on European Affairs, which he chairs, implying that he is a less serious senator than she is. In fact, according to the Boston Globe, Obama has presided over appointment hearings, but nothing more substantive: he took over the subcommittee just as the Presidential campaign began, and all the candidates have been AWOL since then. As for the challenge to Obama’s seriousness, the Senate staff member disputed it, describing him as a deeply thoughtful, well-prepared member of the committee who asks good questions and never tries to score cheap points. In the staff member’s words, Obama can see all sides of an issue, whereas Clinton would be formidable across the negotiating table from, say, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In the Senate, Clinton has gone a long way toward neutralizing skeptics and antagonists by working hard, deferring to seniority, and deploying her underappreciated personal charm. At the same time, she became a Democratic leader in the Senate in part because she understood the powers of the Presidency and the need for an overarching strategy in any major conflict with the executive branch—for example, Neera Tanden said, during the fight to prevent Social Security from being privatized. Presumably, she would turn her knowledge of Congress to her advantage should she return to the White House.

“Her Senate years are when she learned,” Holbrooke said. “How could she conceivably have been such a successful, bipartisan, reach-out senator, collaborating even with impeachment managers, if she hadn’t learned something?” In Holbrooke’s chronicle, her Senate career has instructed her in congressional power and filled the last conceivable holes in her résumé, leaving her perfectly poised for the Presidency. “Here’s my view of the arc of her story,” he said. “The so-called ‘soft issues,’ which are not soft at all—women’s empowerment, H.I.V./AIDS, micro-credit, global health, foreign assistance—are things she mastered as First Lady. Her national-security qualifications are based on her five years as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”

There is another view of her years in the Senate, one suggested by a few associates who have grown wary of Clinton the politician: that she’s learned the lessons of the nineties all too well and become the same careful centrist that electoral setbacks led her husband to become. “ ‘Caution’ is the operative word,” Robert Reich said. “Essentially, Bill Clinton’s agenda ended at the start of 1995, when Republicans took over Congress. What resumed in the White House was a management operation to stay relevant and to keep the Republican Congress at bay.” Clinton associates expressed concern that Hillary’s chief strategist and pollster was Mark Penn, the author of “Microtrends,” who is closely associated with triangulation—the cynical adoption of ideas from both sides of the political divide. And some of her actions in the Senate have had an air of opportunism; in 2005, for example, she co-sponsored a bill to criminalize flag-burning. The burden of Clinton’s long and intensely public political career is that she can be faulted for both excessive caution and excessive zeal. A Clinton associate put it this way to Carl Bernstein: “I’m not sure I want the circus back in town.”

Two nights before the New Hampshire primary, Clinton was more than ninety minutes late for a rally at Winnacunnet High School, in Hampton, and the energy was rapidly seeping out of the cafeteria. The recorded-music track was on its third or fourth round of “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” and the standing crowd of six hundred people (with a slightly larger number in an adjacent auditorium) was no longer amused by a campaign worker tossing out “Hillary” T-shirts like a game-show host. The fearsome Clinton machine appeared to be close to breakdown. “If you’re on the fence, this isn’t such a good thing,” a man next to me said.

Ruth Keene, a small woman of seventy-one years who wore a big blue parka, kept telling the people around us that the candidate would appear any moment. I mentioned to her that a nurse I’d met at a John McCain town-hall meeting had called Clinton “bitchy.” Why did so many people dislike her so much? “Strong woman,” Keene said. “I’m a bitch and proud of it. I can’t talk about her with some of my friends, or it would end the friendship.” As for Obama, she liked him fine, but “the Republicans would chew him up.”

When Clinton finally appeared, in a black pants suit and a bright-pink blouse, there was a surge of excitement, and I noticed how many people in the room were not just female but girls. One who could not have been more than ten held a placard that said, “Hillary 2008, Sophia 2040.” “I apologize for running late,” Clinton said. After the loss to Obama in the Iowa caucus, she told me, New Hampshire was a matter of “do or die,” and, perhaps for that reason, she almost immediately opened the floor to questions, something that she had rarely done earlier in the campaign. Whatever question the crowd threw at her, she had an informed answer, often accompanied by a multi-point plan: immigration, health care, global warming, student loans, small business, animal rights, Cuba. For well over an hour, she projected her voice across the room in the same tone, the same semi-shout, regardless of the question—even when a girl near the stage asked how her third-grade class could become more challenging. “That is really touching,” Clinton said, laughing, but within half a minute she had turned away from the girl and was declaring, “We live in a much more personalized, customized world, but education is still on an industrial model.”

It occurred to me that Clinton is a familiar kind of Democrat—the earnest policy junkie, like Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, or John Kerry—except that this is a wonk with a killer instinct and a passionate temperament under wraps. In our conversation, Clinton seemed to admit that she does not inspire through rhetoric and emotion. “You can also inspire through deeds,” she said. “You can demonstrate determination and willingness to make difficult choices, to show backbone and courage, to confront adversity calmly and skillfully. A President, no matter how rhetorically inspiring, still has to show strength and effectiveness in the day-to-day handling of the job, because people are counting on that. So, yes, words are critically important, but they’re not enough. You have to act. In my own experience, sometimes it’s putting one foot in front of the other day after day.” She cited her efforts on behalf of the health of workers at Ground Zero. “It’s important to realize that, once the lights are off and the cheering crowds are gone, you still have to go back to the Oval Office and figure out how to solve these problems. It really does mean that the buck stops there. You can’t delegate it, you can’t outsource it.”

In the New Hampshire cafeteria, Clinton couldn’t quite make an individual connection, even when listening sympathetically to a woman in the crowd who said that she held down two jobs and still had trouble paying for her asthma medicine. When a man declared himself appalled by the Democrats’ weak statements about terrorism at a televised debate, Clinton snapped, “I’m sorry you were appalled by it,” and moved on. She wouldn’t risk the loss of control that it might take to energize the room with humor or anger or argument, or the sort of spontaneous human touch that everyone who spends private time with her notices and likes. A number of people drifted away before she had finished.

The next morning, Obama was scheduled to appear before an overflow crowd at the opera house in Lebanon. When he walked onto the stage, which was framed by giant vertical banners proclaiming “HOPE,” his liquid stride and handshake-hugs suggested a man completely at ease.

“I decided to run because of you,” he told the crowd. “I’m betting on you. I think the American people are honest and generous and less divided than our politics suggests.” He mocked the response to his campaign from “Washington,” which everyone in the room understood to be Clinton, who had warned in the debate two nights before against “false hopes”: “No, no, no! You can’t do that, you’re not allowed. Obama may be inspiring to you, but here’s the problem—Obama has not been in Washington enough. He needs to be stewed and seasoned a little more, we need to boil the hope out of him until he sounds like us—then he will be ready.”

The opera house exploded in laughter. “We love you,” a woman shouted.

“I love you back,” he said, feeding off the adoration that he had summoned without breaking a sweat. “This change thing is catching on, because everybody’s talking about change. ‘I’m for change.’ ‘Put me down for change.’ ‘I’m a change person, too.’ ”

It was the day before the primary, and Obama began to improvise a theme, almost too much in the manner of Martin Luther King: “In one day’s time.” It carried him through health care, schools, executive salaries, Iraq—everything that Clinton had invoked, except that this was music. Then came the peroration: “If you know who you are, who you’re fighting for, what your values are, you can afford to reach out to people across the aisle. If you start off with an agreeable manner, you might be able to pick off a few folks, recruit some independents into the fold, recruit even some Republicans into the fold. If you’ve got the votes, you will beat them and do it with a smile on your face.” It was a summons to reasonableness, yet Obama made it sound thrilling. “False hopes? There’s no such thing. This country was built on hope,” he cried. “We don’t need leaders to tell us what we can’t do—we need leaders to inspire us. Some are thinking about our constraints, and others are thinking about limitless possibility.” At times, Obama almost seems to be trying to escape history, presenting himself as the conduit through which people’s yearnings for national transformation can be realized.

Obama spoke for only twenty-five minutes and took no questions; he had figured out how to leave an audience at the peak of its emotion, craving more. As he was ending, I walked outside and found five hundred people standing on the sidewalk and the front steps of the opera house, listening to his last words in silence, as if news of victory in the Pacific were coming over the loudspeakers. Within minutes, I couldn’t recall a single thing that he had said, and the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days.

In June of 1992, when Bill Clinton was running third behind President George H. W. Bush and Ross Perot, his advisers were faced with the problem of reconciling his support of the middle class with his character and biography, which, until then, the public associated with Oxford, Yale, womanizing, draft dodging, and marijuana. Their “Manhattan Project”—an effort to introduce Clinton to the country as the hardworking product of a broken family and a rough childhood—helped put him into the lead and culminated in a hugely successful campaign film shown at the Democratic Convention in New York, “The Man from Hope.”

“Hillary Clinton needs something like that,” Dee Dee Myers, who worked on the Manhattan Project, said. “Too often, all we see is ambition.”

Ambition, of course, is the politician’s currency. “Politics has ever been about advancing yourself,” Richard Holbrooke said. “The question is: Is ambition harnessed to a purpose? She has the goals to advance the national purpose, she’s articulated them, she’s tried to lay them out.”

Blame it on the media, or blame it on the voters, but American politics requires something more. A few hours before Clinton’s rally in Hampton, I watched John McCain’s masterly presentation before a packed middle-school gym in Salem, which included many skeptics and independents. An accountant challenged him on his willingness to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent while claiming to be a deficit hawk, telling McCain, “You’re in Purgatory.” The candidate shot back playfully, “Thank you very much. It’s a step up from where I was last summer.” He was witty, combative, humble, and blunt (while embracing Republican orthodoxy on almost every position). Unlike Clinton, he engaged questioners in lengthy back-and-forths that showed he was capable of a respectful disagreement. After hearing Clinton that evening, I thought that she might have a hard time beating McCain in November.

“I’m more reserved than people realize or accept of someone who’s in the public eye, especially in the times in which we live,” Clinton told me. “I think that the world is only beginning to recognize that women should be permitted the same range of leadership styles that we permit men.” She went on, “I followed with great interest the election of Angela Merkel as Germany’s first woman Chancellor. Many of the things that were said about her would certainly sound familiar.” She laughed. Her determination to prove that a woman could be a plausible Commander-in-Chief had led her to restrain her displays of feeling, perhaps for too long. “I wasn’t quite sensitive to that,” she said. “Voters were saying, ‘O.K., now I can look at more personal traits.’ ” She went on, “My friends, starting in November or December, said, ‘You’re not telling your story very well.’ ”

The day before the New Hampshire primary, Clinton, campaigning on three hours of sleep a night, spoke before undecided voters at a coffee shop in Portsmouth. Her eyes welling with tears, she said of the gruelling campaign, “It’s not easy, and I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do. . . . I just don’t want us to fall backwards.” Many voters responded warmly to this candid moment. As Myers put it, “There was a flash in New Hampshire—that there’s another reason that drives her, a desire to help other people.” Since then, Myers said, Clinton has made the mistake of continuing to tell the public what she feels rather than showing it. During the debate in Las Vegas, she tried to explain her commitment to social change by talking about herself, not about the people she wants to help: “It is really my life’s work. It is something that comes out of my own experience, both in my family and in my church—that, you know, I’ve been blessed.” Her response displayed the awkwardness that comes from a lifelong habit of self-concealment in the face of exposure, and toughness in the face of hurt. It’s a little sad and painful that this enormously accomplished and capable woman, in her sixty-first year, had to bring her mother and daughter on a “likability tour” in the days before the Iowa caucus, and found her voice—as she put it—only on the night of her upset win in New Hampshire.

“Hillary needs to connect two things,” Myers said. “What’s in her heart and what she wants to accomplish and why. There are many reasons to think she’d be a good President. She knows what she wants to do, she understands how the process works, she’s shown an ability to work with Congress, she’s become more incrementalist. But the Presidency isn’t all that powerful, except as the bully pulpit. It comes down to your ability to get people to follow you, to inspire. You have to lead. Can she get people to come together, or does she remain such a polarizing figure? That’s what the campaign will be about.” In other words, winning the Presidency might require Clinton to transcend her own history. ♦

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